Fourth Order MCA and Chaos-Based Image Encryption Scheme

This paper presents a fast and efficient cryptosystem for enciphering digital images. It employs two of the most prominent dynamical systems-chaotic maps and cellular automata. The key streams in the proposed encryption scheme are derived from the SHA-256 hash function. Hash functions produce the digest of the input plaintext, known as a hash value, which can be considered as a unique signature of the input. This makes the keys more plaintext dependent, which is a desirable property of a robust cryptosystem. These key streams are used as the secret keys (i.e., initial conditions and control parameters) of an improved one-dimensional (1-D) chaotic map, i.e., the Logistic-Sine map. As far as we know, this paper is a first that combines the well-known diffusion-confusion architecture and the fourth order 1-D memory cellular automata (MCA) for image encryption. First, a pixel-wise XOR operation is applied to the original image, followed by a pixel-wise random permutation. The resulting image is decomposed into four blocks according to the quadtree decomposition strategy. Then, a fourth order reversible MCA is applied, the blocks obtained from the quadtree decomposition are considered as the initial MCA configurations, and the transition rules are determined using the chaotic map. The performance analyses show that the proposed encryption scheme presents a high immunity against all kind of attacks while maintaining a low complexity, which outcome a notably better performance/complexity trade-off compared to some recently proposed image schemes.